Thirty high-level essays on various aspects of semiotics by Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian scholars.

Existential semiotics involves an a priori state of signs and their fixation into objective entities. These essays define this new philosophical field.

Music is said to be the most autonomous and least representative of all the arts. However, it reflects in many ways the realities around it and influences its social and cultural environments. Music is as much biology, gender, gesture - something intertextual, even transcendental. Musical signs can be studied throughout their history as well as musical semiotics with its own background. Composers from Chopin to Sibelius and authors from Nietzsche to Greimas and Barthes illustrate the avenues of this new discipline within semiotics and musicology.